Goat Mountain

24

A TERRIBLE GOD. THAT’S ALL WE KNOW. ATAVISTIC FEAR. God that would make us and destroy us, but we’ve forgotten this god. Our dreams of Jesus have made us soft.

My grandfather pressed me flat against that black earth and was ready to take my eyes. That’s what I know. The mass of him, heavier than this mountain, a different gravity. All that we fail to believe.

Pressing me down through crust, toward the inferno, all of me on fire. But then he held my head in both hands, as if he would care for me. And he was smiling. He was curious about my pain. Unconcerned about bullets coming our way.

You will kill, he said. Eyes gray and small and empty in their centers. Eyes made of time, threads in that gray streaming outward from darkness, bundles and cords of light begun invisible, appearing at the inner edge and crossing that ring to vanish again at the outer edge. The gray a kind of pearl, the surface no surface at all. I was sinking beneath those threads into others beneath, galaxies opening, bundles of pearl-gray cord infinite and revealed only here. I could fall through this place, fall through time, and there would be no end, no ground.

All that is terrible is beautiful. And the times we see are always too brief. A bullet tore into the back of my left leg, deep into the muscle, lodged in bone. No graze but a falling away of breath and thought and the spread of some deep animal fear. I closed my eyes and my grandfather sat me upright, shook me and braced a knee behind my back. The rifle in my hands, and he was sliding in another round.

You will kill him now, he said. You will find him in that scope and feel those crosshairs dig into his chest and let that bullet go. You will do that or you will die here.

I could no longer speak. I was falling away and my grandfather was keeping me from falling. I looked through the scope and saw empty sky, whited blue. Then trees from the mountains far on the other side of the valley rushing at impossible speeds, flung across the surface in arcs, then black ground, white twisted shapes, and my leg was hollowed out and burning, a kind of shell for holding flame.

My father had come closer. Somehow I knew that. An ally. My grandfather rising up like some great bear to meet him, and I knew he would crush my father. Skull in his hands. I fell back against the earth and he blotted out most the sky, becoming larger in every moment, feeding on our fear, and I swung that rifle upward and leaned the barrel against his side and pulled the trigger.

The boom in close, odd muffled sound with the barrel against him, and I knew the shot would have no effect. He was too large, growing still, and he was made of something we’ve never known, something that pulls against all else we can see or feel and makes its birth possible, something that can bring rock itself into being. This bullet would travel endlessly inside him and never find a target. It would travel for thousands of years and hit nothing because it would have a shadow somewhere immovable. Those thousands of years become less than an instant and the bullet vanished and winking into being and gone.

Dark sky above me swaying in place, and some vent had been opened. I heard his lung collapse, heard the breath of it come out through his side, and it seemed almost that he could be a man. My own head swimming, riding waves of pain and pulse, blacking out, but I could see him turn and look down at me and his mouth was open for air. No intake, and there was amazement on his face. He looked at me as if I were god myself, his final trick.

His arms and hands shrunken away and reaching for me. He was tottering backward, righted himself, tilted forward, and I knew he would fall and I would be crushed.

His eyes the brightest gray, brushed metal, and fixed on me as his enormous bulk came down. A fall we took together, meeting somewhere between, time slowed and gravity thinned, and what I felt was love.

That fall an eternity, and I was crushed between mountains, held against black earth by the weight of something darker still, and had no breath. My father’s face lost and desperate, made a child again, pulling at the great body, all his world gone. He pulled at that body until it was rolled off me, and then he wept over his father.

It was not possible for my grandfather to die. He broke every rule when he did that. God without end.